Making DR Fun – The No Jerks Way

Each year, Connectria conducts a Disaster Recovery tabletop exercise. As you probably know, we like to add a little fun to all of our events and training. We are serious about being prepared, and our training, and find that incorporating fun helps information stick better in our brains. For this particular training, last year involved a Sharknado simulation and this year was the Zombie Apocalypse!

During this exercise, the Zombie employees were not allowed to assist the offsite DR team at all but were able to provide full customer support. The apocalypse allowed for all of the facilities to be functional but completely off limits as we had to surrender them to the ravenous zombies. The team did everything in their power to keep the hosting services up and running which required a lot of work with very little time. The team also discovered that during the battle of fighting off zombies with Nerf guns and cricket bats, we managed to strike several servers, rendering them inoperable.

After the gruesome fighting had concluded, there was still connectivity to the data center with a very small number of customers impacted. To bring these customers back to life, the team worked through troubleshooting scenarios until everything was restored to its pre-apocalyptic state. (We should probably note that no customer’s environments were actually touched during the entire exercise.)

We really enjoyed the exercise and greatly benefited from it. The exercise allowed us more insight into customer specific scenarios in addition to working around resource constraints and enhancing our Disaster Recovery plan. We closed any potential gaps in the plans and enjoyed some cross-training. Most importantly, we feel more confident than ever that when the real Zombie Apocalypse happens, even that won’t be enough to affect our dedication to service!